Jeff, would you consider doing an AMA?

[Anonymous]

I would love it!

[jsteele]

Okay, what do you want to ask?

[Anonymous]

I have a question: Is what you do with DCUM a lucrative full time job?

[Anonymous]

Do people you know in real life admit to reading DCUM?

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:I have a question: Is what you do with DCUM a lucrative full time job?

It is a full time job. It was lucrative until about mid-March when online advertising revenue collapsed. Hopefully, it will be lucrative again some day.

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:Do people you know in real life admit to reading DCUM?

Yes, but most of my closest friends never read it.

[Anonymous]

Do you have any favorite posters?

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:Do you have any favorite posters?

Because everyone is anonymous it is generally difficult, if not impossible, to know who is who. But there are a few posters whose posts I often recognize and with whom I generally agree. So, I appreciate their posts. I don't know if that makes them favorites, exactly.

[Anonymous]

Do you ever post anonymously?

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have a question: Is what you do with DCUM a lucrative full time job?

It is a full time job. It was lucrative until about mid-March when online advertising revenue collapsed. Hopefully, it will be lucrative again some day.

Has it at least been offset in part by increased traffic since people have a lot more time on their hands at home?

[Anonymous]

Best moment of DCUM?

Worst moment of DCUM?

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do you have any favorite posters?

Because everyone is anonymous it is generally difficult, if not impossible, to know who is who. But there are a few posters whose posts I often recognize and with whom I generally agree. So, I appreciate their posts. I don't know if that makes them favorites, exactly.

Do you check IP addresses to see if it's the same person posting different stuff that sounds similar? I mean out of curiosity, not due to an issue with the post.

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:Do you ever post anonymously?

Almost never. I learned very early that some posters have a remarkable ability to recognize people by their writing style. I would be terribly embarrassed to get called out. But, once or twice I've had questions involving my kids and I asked them anonymously to protect their privacy. In one case, the responses were really rude.

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have a question: Is what you do with DCUM a lucrative full time job?

It is a full time job. It was lucrative until about mid-March when online advertising revenue collapsed. Hopefully, it will be lucrative again some day.

Has it at least been offset in part by increased traffic since people have a lot more time on their hands at home?

No, initially traffic actually dropped. Now it has returned to previous levels but we haven't had an increase. We still make enough money to pay the bills, but I've put my French chalet plans on hold for a while (that was a joke).

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:Best moment of DCUM?

Worst moment of DCUM?

I don't know about the best moment. There have been a lot of good times. I liked being invited to the Kojo Show.

The worst time was when we had a three-day outage. That actually started sometime before the actual outage when the system started working very slowly. I spent several days troubleshooting and not being able to identify the cause. In an act of desperation, I bought two new servers that I thought would speed things up. That didn't work and then the entire thing eventually crashed and the database cluster got corrupted. Restoring the database took hours and then didn't work and I had to restore several times. I was basically working around the clock for three days. It was really stressful. It got fixed when I accidentally unplugged the switch. That caused the database cluster to crash again, but when everything came back up it was really fast. The problem turned out to be the switch. I was angry that I hadn't been about to diagnose that and felt really foolish.